Wall Street’s big payouts come as the remuneration committee at Royal Bank of Scotland prepares to meet this week to determine the size of its bonus pot.

RBS — 84%-owned by British taxpayers — has indicated it wants to pay its investment bankers about £1.5 billion in bonuses, even though it will make a loss this year at group level. The figure could creep higher if it attempts to shelter its bankers from the impact of Alistair Darling’s 50% tax on bonuses.

Lord Myners, the City minister, has called a meeting of global finance ministers and regulators in Downing Street this month to discuss other levies that could be introduced to prevent future crises. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said this weekend he would support calls for a new global charge on banks.

America’s bonus payouts come days after President Barack Obama revealed plans for a windfall tax on banks in an effort to curb the “obscene” bonus culture.

Anger over the huge payments will be heightened by the fact that many of the banks are not profitable.

Of the four due to report figures this week only Goldman is expected to post a profit at the net income level, according to a consensus of analyst forecasts.The losses blow a hole in the argument that the bonuses represent pay for performance.

However, all the banks are expected to show large gains in their investment banking divisions, which have been boosted by financial stimulus operations orchestrated by governments around the world...MORE...LINK-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

The entire way the Big Government/International Banking system is arranged has descended into farce: 1) Big Government fraudsters hire former banking executives to run the central banks and federal economic agencies and departments; 2) those "public servants" transfer billions of taxpayer dollars to the big banks (and in some cases, such as RBS mentioned above, buy an 84% taxpayer "ownership" stake), all under the guise of "economic stimulus"; 3) the banks then use the taxpayer-financed windfall to tout their own incredible "skill and "success", hence justifying paying their executives hundreds of millions in bonuses; 4) meanwhile, those bonuses drain dividends and returns paid to average stockholders (which in the case of RBS is the average taxpayer); 5) phonies like Barack Obama profess outrage, and say they will "punish" these evil banksters by levying taxes on their windfall profits -- the net effect being instead of hundreds of millions in fraudulently attained bonuses, the banksters net tens of millions ("Oy vey, how we suffer!"); 6) banksters donate a few million to elect or re-elect the next generation of corrupt politicians that are the basis of all of this, who then recycle the next generation of Rubins, Summers, Paulsons and Geithners through the racket; 7) this new generation of politician and bankster swindlers instructs the hapless and gullible masses that they have accomplished political "change," so there is no need to change the underlying structure of the system.

The entire fraud is one massive bait-and-switch swindle engineered by Wall Street and Washington. Do the participants care? Hell no. They're laughing all the way to the bank and retreating behind gated communities and massive financial portfolios made fat by transferring wealth from average Joe and his progeny into their accounts via this byzantine scheme.

But hey, in the post-Christian West, they tell themselves, "living well is the best revenge, right? Who cares if we're plundering the future itself to accomplish this fraud? Western civilization is comprised of a bunch of [pick your poison] anti-Semites/racists/anti-Marxists/anti-Zionists/anti-Globalizationsts anyway, so they're all getting exactly what they deserve!"

Hence the fraudulent Big Government/Marxist/Zionist mindset infects the entirety of the "elite," from far Left to Neoliberal Left to Neocon Right, and all their various selfish, dim-witted, functionally-fascist coattail hangers-on and dupes in between.